Britain is reduced to 16th in world league

Michael Heseltine launches White Paper designed to create an enterprise centre of Europe

John Prescott yesterday accused the Government of presiding over "17 wasted years" after the Deputy Prime Minister, Michael Heseltine, unveiled a White Paper on competitiveness confirming that Britain had slipped from 15 to 16 in the world league since the Tories came to office.

The centrepiece was the proposal to boost education and training for those over-16, revealed last week in the Independent. Mr Heseltine promised a White Paper on self-government in schools with legislation on discipline in the autumn.

John Redwood, former Secretary of State for Wales and leading right-winger on the Tory backbenches, urged the Government to go further. He called for whole class teaching, more learning of tables, and a reversion to traditional methods of teaching. Today Mr Redwood, leader of the Conservative 2000 Foundation, will challenge the Labour leader Tony Blair to co-sign a letter to the 10 worst-performing education authorities drawing their attention to the problems of numeracy and literacy.

The White Paper - creating the enterprise centre of Europe - also contained proposals to cut red tape on business, and persuade firms to pay bills on time, but it took all Mr Heseltine's presentational skills to avoid embarrassment in the Commons. He told colleagues when he ordered the audit of Britain's competitiveness that he would "take it on the chin". He was privately advised against publishing some of the details, but yesterday his bullish performance did not seek to hide the fact that Britain still lags behind the rest of the world.

Britain's position would have been two places lower in the league, but Mr Heseltine insisted that Singapore and Hong Kong, who were higher, could not be included in the table of world competitiveness because although highly successful, they were not members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Mr Prescott said the 236-page document was "fatter, and has more pictures and more than a whiff of the forthcoming general election about it". The deputy leader of the Labour Party accused the Government of managing decline.

Mr Heseltine put the best gloss on the report, insisting that it showed the decline in Britain's position had been arrested after the Tories came to power in 1979. Between 1982 and 1993, Britain grew faster than any of the G7 countries apart from Japan.

"We have the highest level of inward investment as a proportion of GDP of any developed country - we attract over a third of all the inward investment into Europe. It is the biggest vote of confidence we could have," Mr Heseltine said.

But there was laughter in the Commons when he said Britain's relative position according to the OECD figures had gone from 15 to 16 over the past 17 years, not down to 18 in the league table. Mr Prescott shouted "forging ahead" - the name of an earlier White Paper on competitiveness.

Behind the White Paper, however, there are battles over the action needed to improve education and training, which promises to be a key battle ground at the election. Gillian Shephard, Secretary of State for Education, announced proposals to reform teacher training and promote self-improvement within schools.